The Magic Kingdom (23 page)

Benny was a true gambler. He lived with hope.

So when Moorhead said no damage had been done, that was good enough for Benny Maxine. He had his plan. The following morning it was a simple thing to ditch the tour, return to his room, and complete the call that Rena with her troubles and scruples had interrupted the night before.

He told a hotel operator that it was Mr. Maxine calling from 627 and said that though he’d written it down when she gave it to him he’d somehow managed to misplace Mary Cottle’s room number. Putting a low wink in his voice, he impressed the fact upon her that it wasn’t the 629 registration he was interested in but the other one. He’d hold while she looked it up. When she came back on the line and said she wasn’t permitted to give that one out, Benny chuckled. “What,” he said, taking his voice as deep as it would go, “an unpublished hotel room? What the devil, eh?” He said he thought he might just possibly have left it in his pants pocket and let it go out with the dry cleaning. Or, the more fool he, in the pocket of his pajama top, perhaps, and hinted at the great frantic pressures of dishevelment and abandon. “You know how it is, eh?
You
know how it is, I’ll be bound.”

“I can connect you with laundry service,” the telephone operator told him coolly.

Benny said that was damned decent but that now it seemed to him that that’s not what had happened at all. He rather remembered having scribbled it down on the financial pages of yesterday’s paper. Perhaps the girl who made the room up…?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “When a guest says that we can’t give a number out, we can’t give the number out.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Benny Maxine said. “I quite understand; it goes back to the English common law,” and took the operator into the conspiracy. “Miss Cottle and I are engaged, actually. I wanted to surprise her with this great bouquet of flowers just. I’m holding them now. They should be popped into water at once, but without my fiancée’s room number, of course…”

“Just pop over to six twenty-nine, why don’t you just?” she said.

“Well, the thing of it is,” Benny explained, “she’s staying there with her great brute old Aunt Nedra, who doesn’t know about our engagement yet, and—” The line went dead.

I’m smart, Benny thought, but I have to admit, there’s a lot I don’t know. He went over and over what he’d said to the woman, remembering his gaffes like a good dealer recalling every card already played.

Still, he knew now he was on to something, and before they left the hotel that morning he turned gumshoe and, at a discreet distance, tailed Mary Cottle everywhere she went. She went window shopping on the big concourse. She went to get sunglasses. She went to the newsstand for a paper.

If he hadn’t gotten on an up elevator he thought was going down, he might not have found it. The car was crowded. And when Benny looked at the panel above the elevator doors he saw that it would be stopping at every floor. It was very crowded. People pressed against his enlarged liver, his vulnerable bones. “Sorry,” he said, “sorry,” and got off on eight. Maids were making the rooms up, their big carts unguarded in the wide corridors. He went up and was about to take some extra soaps and shoe cloths from one when the housekeeper suddenly emerged from 822. She was emptying trash: gray and black cigarette butts, yellow tobacco the color of sick dog shit loose in the bottoms of the ashtrays, even the ashes odd, not entirely consumed by fire, balled, thick as slag, the crumpled packet of those cheap, stinking second- and third-world cigarettes she smoked only the final proof.

Bingo!
thought the good and lucky gambler, Benny Maxine.
I’ve found it! I’ve found her hidey-hole!

2

W
hen the rash appeared on his arm, an even circle about two inches high that wrapped around his biceps like a red and gaudy garter, Eddy Bale removed the mourner’s band—to spare its sight from the children, he’d been wearing it under his left shirt sleeve like a blood pressure cuff—and, folding the cloth, put it into the pocket of his trousers. It was the third time he’d repositioned it, taking it in an inch or so when he’d transferred it that first time from his mackintosh to his suit coat on the day after the funeral, and taking it in again to place directly against his flesh. His shifting, meandering grief like an old river, his deferential hideout sorrow on the lam in his pants.

The rash still hadn’t gone away even after he had begun to carry the carefully folded brassard about with him in his pockets. (Moving it about even then, each day relocating the dark cloth, positioning it first in this pocket, then in that, carrying it in his back pocket, in the pockets where he carried his handkerchief, his room key, his change.) The rash didn’t itch. It was adiabatíc, neutral to the touch as the circle of cloth itself. It didn’t bother him at all, really, and each morning when he shaved, when he showered, it always came to him as a surprise to see that it was still there at all. The rash itself was of a piece—no tiny blossoms erupted there; the skin neither bubbled with texture nor tingled with impression the way a head sometimes recalls a hat one has already removed—smooth as the hairless space it occupied on his upper arm, the discoloration of the lingering wide red ring like some healed graft of complexion. He would have asked Colin Bible to take a look except that he assumed the nurse assumed they were on the outs. He might have asked Moorhead, but mere was usually something or other to take care of when they were together and he forgot. Or had second thoughts, at the last minute more protective than otherwise of his ruby garter of grief, insensitive as idle genitals, undisturbed private parts. (Knowing that the other one, the black, already frayed and fraying mourner’s band, of which the bloodshot rash was only the raddled ghost, would dissolve, decompose, return as broken fiber, a ball of dark fragmented lint, the uncremated ash of Liam’s memory that would stick to his pants and shirt pockets, lining his clothes like a stain that would not come out.)

He missed him. He missed the Liam of those last and awful weeks when he and Ginny knew it was all up with their dying and now plainly suffering child, when they could hear his medication on his tongue, smell it on his breath, the drying, parched relief of his only mitigated pain. He missed that Liam because he had almost forgotten the other. (Because what you remember, Eddy Bale thought, what sticks to the ribs and drives everything else out, as the tune you’re hearing drives out all other tunes or the taste of your food all other taste, is neither pleasure nor pain but only the heavy saliency of things. Liam’s condition had come upon him and been diagnosed when the boy was eight years old. He died when he was twelve. Two thirds of his boy’s life was lived in the remission of ordinary childhood, yet Bale found it almost impossible to remember those things. They must have happened, they had to have happened; Liam himself, recalling his own happy salience, had reminded him, dozens of times, of occasions they had gone on outings, of movies they’d seen together, trips to museums, treats they had taken in restaurants, picture books they’d read to him when he was small, stories Eddy told him at bedtime, the afternoon which, oddly, Bale has no memory of at all, when Liam claims Eddy had taught him to fly a kite on Hampstead Heath—total recall for the father/son sports—and, at this remove, can’t even be sure what, when healthy, his kid’s character had been like.) Knowing only—it’s certainly not memory, it isn’t actually knowledge, perhaps it isn’t even love but only some shadow in the blood, or maybe the bones of his weighted, sunken heart—Liam’s negative presence.

Indeed, it may have been for grief of Liam that Eddy felt the dream holiday was not going as it should. The children hadn’t complained, none of the adults had said anything, but Bale had the feeling he’d made mistakes, that decorum had broken down, that something militated against honor here. Ginny wouldn’t have approved, but that wasn’t it. (And wasn’t it odd that Eddy gave almost no thought at all to Ginny’s own negative presence?) Perhaps, by splitting them into two groups that first day, it had been possible for Bale to think of Liam as being with the other group, the children who’d gone off with Colin and Mary Cottle to the Haunted Mansion. It was even possible to think of him as being in one of the other rooms, assigned, say, to Moorhead’s contingent or to Mary and Nedra’s. (It wasn’t as if he wished to be reminded. He’d deliberately left Liam’s scrapbook at home. Or perhaps Ginny had taken it with her when she left him. He hadn’t looked for it. The photos were chiefly of the ill Liam, clipped from newspapers, most of them. He well enough remembered the ill Liam. That was the head- bandaged boy he vaguely thought of as being in those other rooms, the negative presence, as available to him as his rash.

Idle minds, he thought, devil’s workshop.

He has to think about, then alter, whatever it is that’s amiss—that busted decorum which was maybe only the weals, flaws, blots, and smears of their maculate, tarnished lives. The riot that festered in all despair. That flourished in Bale’s manipulative, arranged fun. Because already order has broken down. He has caught reports—not even reports, hints and high signs, the excited, febrile signals of their encoded deceits. There have been goings-on in the lifts, scenes and sprees. He is embarrassed for his dying charges. The children are uninhibited in the restaurants, flaunting their illnesses, boasting their extremis. (And now a sort of rivalry has sprung up. Disney World has become a sort of Mecca for such children, a kind of reverse Lourdes. Each day Eddy, the kids, see other damaged children: Americans, of course, but there is a family from Spain, a contingent from South America. There are African kids with devastating tropical diseases. He’s heard that a leper or two is in the park. It’s a sort of Death’s Invitational here. Eddy isn’t the only one to have had the idea. Organizations have sprung up. The new style is to grant the wishes of terminally ill children, to deal reality the blows of fantasy.) Nedra Carp thinks Benny Maxine may be spying on the girls. At fifteen he’s the oldest of the children—unless Mudd- Gaddis is—and annoys her with his needs. She wants the door connecting their adjoining rooms kept locked.

“We can’t do that. Suppose Colin Bible has to get in there?”

“He’s beastly. He’s a nasty, beastly boy. He tells them smutty stories.”

“He’s a pubescent kid. He’s showing off. What’s the harm? He probably has a crush on them.”

“His conversation is all double entendre. He teases my girls. He milks his zits and tells them there’s sperm in his pores. That they could become pregnant if he touched them.”

“He’s flirting. Don’t you think they need someone to flirt with them?”

“Those little girls are dying, Mister Bale.”

“What would you like me to do, Miss Carp?”

“We’re responsible for these children. Surely you could speak to him.”

“And tell him what? That he not only has to accept his death but his virginity too?”

(And remembers that Liam had begun to masturbate two months before he died.)

“You think I’m an old maid.”

“No. Of course not.”

“You do. Yes. You think I’m picturesque. You think I’m this quaint, picturesque spinster. That’s why you invited me.”

“Not at all.”

“Not at all? You believe you smell cedar chest on me. Sachet, laundry soap, and an old hygiene.”

“I’ll say something to Benny.”

“I know about bodies,” Nedra Carp said.

“About bodies.”

“I
know
about bodies!” she said.

He did say something to Benny. It was embarrassing for him, but it was hardly a man-to-man talk. He didn’t give him the birds and the bees. Benny would already have the birds and the bees. He didn’t make Nedra Carp’s crisp case for the unseemliness of the boy’s position. He didn’t even warn Benny off, lay down the law, or try to appeal to the kid’s sense of the special vulnerability of doomed girls. What he did in effect was to tell Benny what he hadn’t dared to tell Liam. What he did in effect, to forestall anxiety and allay fear, and out of neither makeshift bonhomie nor Dutch-uncle, scout-master love, was to apologize to Benny Maxine on behalf of everyone who would be surviving him.

“You’ll be missing out.”

“So it’s all it’s cracked up to be, is it?”

“I’m afraid so,” Eddy Bale admitted.

“I thought it might be,” Benny Maxine said. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

“Five-alarm.”

“Fantastic,” Benny Maxine said.

When the child tried to draw him out about which parts of a woman’s anatomy Eddy preferred, the breasts, the behind, or the quim, Bale blushed and said he supposed it was a matter of individual taste.

Benny smiled and nudged Bale in the side with his elbow.

“You know what gets
me?”
he said.

“Perhaps I oughtn’t to be talking to you like this.”

“Their pelt.”

“Perhaps these things might more properly be discussed in the home environme—”

“Their pelt, their fleece, their fell, their fur,” Benny went on happily. “Their miniver, their feathers.”

“Yes, well,” Eddy said.

“Ask you a
ques
tion?”

Bale stared at the boy.

“It’s personal, but you’re the one brung it up.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Bale said ruefully.

“Well,” Benny Maxine said, “what it is then is…it’s just only it’s a bit awkward, me putting it, like.”

“Look,” Eddy said, “not on my account. I mean, if you’re at all uncomfortable about this, you don’t have to—”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” the child reminded him.

“Right,” said Eddy.

“I’m still pretty much virgo intacta and all,” Benny told him. “Well,” he said, “you must
know
that or we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?”

“Hey,” Eddy reassured him, “at your age I was pretty virgo intacta myself. You make too much of it.”

“Of virginity?”

He recalled Benny’s list. The miniver, the feathers. “Of birds,” Bale said.

“Well, it ain’t the birds exactly.”

“Maybe you should talk to Mister Moorhead,” Eddy said quickly. “He’s the physician on board. He could advise you on these things better than I. If this is anything at all to do with the effects of self-abuse on your condition, I’m sure he can fill you in on what’s what.”